Duke University professor Felipe De Brigard has been awarded an $800,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for his work on the intersection of memory, imagination, and counterfactual thinking.
Key facts
- •Felipe De Brigard is a professor at Duke University and a cognitive scientist who studies the fallibility of memory.
- •The MacArthur Foundation fellowship awarded to De Brigard is valued at $800,000.
- •De Brigard’s research indicates that the hippocampus is required for both episodic memory and imagining personal possibilities.
- •The ongoing research project in Colombia examines how forgiveness influences the emotional reaction to memories of political violence.
- •De Brigard argues that forgiveness is a strategy for emotional regulation that does not require the erasure of factual memory details.
Felipe De Brigard, a professor at Duke University and cognitive scientist, was recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The "genius grant" provides an $800,000 award with no strings attached. De Brigard is only the second philosopher to receive this fellowship in the past 30 years.
By the numbers
Memory and Imagination Mechanisms
De Brigard’s research explores how the human brain uses similar mental machinery to both reconstruct the past and imagine the future. He notes that the brain does not record experiences like a digital camera; instead, it stores specific details and fills in gaps during retrieval. This process is closely tied to the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic recollection and imagining personal possibilities. De Brigard defines "episodic counterfactual thinking" as the brain's ability to imagine what could have happened in the past. He argues that this connection between memory and imagination is an evolutionary strategy, allowing humans to generate hypotheses and hedge against future uncertainty.
Research on Forgiveness and AI
De Brigard plans to use the majority of his fellowship funds to support a research project in Colombia focused on memory and forgiveness in the wake of the country's peace agreement 10 years ago. His work suggests that forgiveness involves the emotional reappraisal of memories rather than the forgetting of events, helping individuals regulate their reactions to past wrongdoings. Regarding artificial intelligence, De Brigard suggests that the urgent issue is not necessarily AI consciousness, but rather AI agency. He believes that as AI systems exhibit more agency, society will need to establish regulations and rules for human interaction with these systems, regardless of whether they possess subjective consciousness.
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This article was independently rewritten by ManyPress editorial AI from reporting originally published by Scientific American.
